ARTMargins Open Forum “Where’s the Margins?”

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Published 12/26/2008

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ARTMargins is launching an OPEN FORUM devoted to the question "WHERE’S THE MARGINS?". The forum is dedicated to the status of the periphery, the margins, and the eccentric in politics, art, and criticial discourse in Eastern Europe today.

With the recent political and cultural integration of Europe, its Central and Eastern half’s comfortable position on the periphery – once a major selling point for its fledgling art scenes – seems to be a thing of the past. Or is it? Where is the "margin of margins" today? Do we (does Eastern Europe) gain anything from epithets such as "marginality" and "periphery" at this point in time?

And, if we live in a poly-marginal (rather than poly-centric) world, how and where can Eastern Europe finds its own periphery? And how relevant are technical vocabularies such as (post-) postcolonialism or the subaltern for its search for marginality?

Further, might it be helpful to link Eastern Europe to other peripheries, as is increasingly happening (say, Eastern Europe with certain parts of South or Central America)? Are such links helpful in questioning the newly ermergent poly-marginal world?

Finally, does today’s poly-peripheral world betray more affinities with the Cold War paradigm than we are willing to admit? And, if the answer is yes, how does that reality impact art’s possibilities for intervention, in Eastern Europe and beyond?

The Open Forum opens in December with an introductory prompt by Peter McCarthy.

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